The Sunday Intertitle: Somewhere

That’s right — we’re back to M. VERDOUX, and we’re about to meet him.

By Chaplin’s standards, showing up in scene 3 counts as a delayed entrance. The purpose of a delayed entrance, other than to set up the story in the most effective order, which sometimes forces a key character to come in late, is usually to build anticipation. Chaplin could rely on his audience to be anticipating his appearance anyway, but he helps them out — the titles speak of almost no one BUT Chaplin. Then he narrates the prologue in the cemetery. Then we have a scene with the awful Couvais family, who are talking of only two things — the absent Thelma Couvais, who we shall never meet, and the absent Verdoux, as yet unnamed.

Following the narrative style of the day, and of days before, Chaplin doesn’t go straight from his snapshot in scene 2 to the live action, as Welles might have done (KANE is full of associational transitions and omitted establishing shots. Chaplin gives us an exterior and a superimposed title, which again reads like a theatrical programme note. I like the “somewhere.” “A small villa in the South of France” would have done fine, but “somewhere” makes it mysterious. Verdoux is evidently up to no good if his location is “somewhere” rather than somewhere specific.

We meet our man cutting flowers — engaged in an act both romantic and murderous. Then the camera pans off him, all on its own accord, to observe the incinerator belching black smoke. Chabrol’s LANDRU makes a very dark running gag out of this smoke, which also has a Wellesian aspect — the penultimate image of KANE is rising smoke from the burning sled, which also has aspects of a cremation. (THE TRIAL also ends with a cloud of smoke.) Two neighbours, wheeled in for expositional duties, remark that the incinerator’s been going for three days.

Now Verdoux stops to avoid stepping on this critter. So we get the “wouldn’t hurt a fly” angle. David Bordwell, in his marvelous essay, notes that “Verdoux” translates as “sweet worm” or “gentle worm,” and the fuzzy specimen Verdoux rescues is the very embodiment of both those translations, even if it isn’t actually a worm by strict taxonomy. (What is it, cine-entomologists?)

Chaplin is admiring himself before the mirror (of course) when the doorbell rings. Of course, there’s a vanity, even a narcissism about Chaplin. The idea that confidence is attractive reaches, in certain celebrities, a grotesque point: if they love themselves so much, thinks the audience, maybe we should too? Is that the appeal of a certain preening former Prez?

Robert Parrish, future director and former child actor in CITY LIGHTS, tells a funny story about VERDOUX in his fun memoir Growing Up in Hollywood. Working as film editor by this time, he still associated with Chaplin via weekend tennis matches, and one day Chaplin asked him to look at five takes.

This story is dodgy, I think. Parrish describes the sequence consisting of Chaplin doing a little dance at the foot of some stairs, something that doesn’t happen in VERDOUX. It could be a deleted scene, but whenever Parrish describes a scene from a Chaplin film, as in his CITY LIGHTS reminiscences, it’s a scene that doesn’t exist, but has a generically Chaplinesque feel. I think it’s quite possible that Parrish was told a version of this tale, and assimilated it into his own stock of anecdotes. The gist of the story is too good not to be believed.

Anyway, Parrish says he watches the five takes and Chaplin asks him to pick the best. Parrish offers his opinion. Chaplin prefers another take. But what about the crewmember who wanders into shot in that take? asks Parrish.

“What are you looking at HIM for?”demands Chaplin.

The Death of the Arthur: Me and my Galahad

“See what happens in PASSAGE OF PERIL, Chapter Six of ADVENTURES OF SIR GALAHAD…” And it’s true enough, you will see what happens. What happens may not be very exciting or intelligent, but you do see it. Unlike Sir Bors, here:

Not much funny stuff, the early episodes were deceptive. True, there’s an appearance by Ray “Crash” Corrigan, unrecognisable without his ape suit. There’s a hovel with a PORCH, a bit of anachronism that somehow isn’t absurd enough to be worthwhile. There’s a dungeon, slightly more convincing than the one in that Three Stooges medieval mess, but the script requires this dungeon to have separate cells, so it ends up looking like a couple of stone cottages transported to the inside of a cavern. It’s a medieval dungeon in spirit, sort of, but in layout it’s still a western jailhouse.

Sir Bartog the bad joins a group of outlaws, which entails dressing up as Robin Hood, sort of. He hasn’t really got the figure for it.

The existence of cheap magic is the main quality separating this from a western serial (which I would never watch — the repetitive action would be just the same as this, but the comedy relief would be louder and more grizzled, wouldn’t it?), but there’s no funny business from either Merlin, Morgane le Fay, or the Lady in the Lake between episode two and episode nine, so my craving for fantasy was experiencing a drought. There are altogether more tavern/barroom brawls than fancy spells cast.

Escapes, captures, escapes, captures.

Finally, some magic — the cheapest kind, invisibility! As I said in my Bill Rebane feature, having people vanish is actually cheaper than NOT having them vanish: just stop paying the actors and they’ll disappear of their own accord. Here, Morgane Le Fay has an enchanted ring borrowed from The Hobbit. The jump-dissolve in which she faces from view is marred by mistiming — you can actually see her shoulder slipping away on the right of frame: so they filmed her speaking, then had her step out of shot to produce an empty frame, but when they mixed the two together you get a marginal overlap where you see one-and-a-bit Morganes at the same time.

Bottom right corner of first pic.

You might wonder how such a screw-up can happen, and also how the clapper boy makes a similar spectral appearance in Kubrick’s LOLITA. It’s because when a dissolve or fade is being indicated by the editor, he makes a cut and draws a couple lines on the work print to indicate the duration of the transition. There’s no way to actually check what the effect will look like until the lab has done its work, but the editor is supposed to check the material before the incoming shot, and after the outgoing one, to see there’s enough good footage to make the mix work. Sometimes, they forget. Easy to see how that would happen in a cheap serial, harder to figure when the Great Stanley K. is at the helm.

When Morgane reappears, the effect is better managed, but her dress is swaying even though she’s supposed to have been standing still. It’s like the wobbly top had in Mrs. Kane’s lodging house in CITIZEN KANE — a winking spyhole into the creative mysteries.

TO BE (I hope) CONCLUDED

Food Fighters

Maybe, just maybe, the food fight in THE GREAT DICTATOR was an influence on the deleted pie fight from DR STRANGELOVE? Is it even possible that the fruit-slinging that concludes the Marx Bros’ DUCK SOUP lies behind both? Maybe that’s a stretch. But reducing the horrors of war to the absurdity of food-flinging evidently has an honourable tradition. Maybe Laurel & Hardy suggested the theme by naming their great custard pie fight film THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY?

Chaplin is no slouch when it comes to foodstuffs as ammunition. A childhood of near-starvation left him with a complicated relationship with food — nearly every Chaplin film seems to have a gag about the absence of food, the smelliness of food, the noisiness of digestion, the perils of ingestion, or the use of various platters as ballistic weapons. BEHIND THE SCREEN featured one of comparatively few pitched pie fights in the silent screen’s history.

“To the buffet!” proclaims Billy Gilbert as Garbitsch, and audiences who like anticipating things may already be imagining some sploshy chaos. The swank dinners in Chaplin films always feature bizarre menus, selected not for compatibility but for slapstick possibilities. Here, the presence of the dictator of Bacteria, which stands for Italy, excuses the ever-present spaghetti. Surprisingly, mustard will prove more significant in the battle of the buffet.

Great reaction from Gilbert after he clears the buffet of undesirables, and then finds he’s to be included in their number. The actor has a unique ability to make his eyes stand out like horrified plums, loosely embedded in a slack pudding of a face — only the affronted orbs display emotion, but they compensate by sheer intensity for the limpness of the surrounding flesh.

Chaplin immediately recoils from an odorous Camemberg, a callback to countless cheese jokes in his past, most relevantly SHOULDER ARMS, where a similarly noisome cheese becomes a chemical weapon of devastating power.

Considering this kind of thing is new to him — dialogue played over the silent set-up for a gag where cream and mustard will be confused — he manages it very well. I can’t say that he’s as great a talking comic as he is a silent one, but he shows skill at combining the two forms — only Harold Lloyd and Laurel & Hardy really got to try the same thing.

The dispute as to whether the treaty will be signed before or after Napaloni’s troops are removed from the Osterlich border is classic vaudeville/music hall crosstalk. Anticipating the negotiation scenes in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and A DAY AT THE RACES. Fiona points out that Chaplin told Groucho he envied his facility with dialogue, adding weight to my hypothesis that Napaloni is a straight steal of Chico’s mangling of English. Here, however, Heinkel is the one playing it deliberately dense, attempting to wear the Bacterian dictator down by sheer refusal to recognize the basis of their argument.

Heinkel makes an angry gesture and spatters cream on the head of a flunky who’s tossing the spaghetti. Napaloni, in a rage, accidentally bites into the treaty, having incorporated it into his sandwich the way he intends to incorporate Osterlich into his empire.

The battle then becomes a matter of demonstrating with the buffet what the military forces of each dictator will do to the other’s. Napaloni stabs a huge sausage into a Devil’s Tower Wyoming heap of mashed potato, then swats it sideways. Heinkel bombards the punch bowl with an orange (I think it’s an orange. We’re in black and white so it’s more of a grey.)

The blocking of the scene is very simple but very, very effective. The two bosses and their two underlings are lines up along the table. Sometimes the leaders face off, sometimes they turn and complain to their seconds, a babel of Tomainian and Bacterian tirades. Dialogue as sheer noise. Overlapping a year before CITIZEN KANE, but to rather different effect.

Heinkel slathers mustard on his fresh plate of strawberries, and —

Then Napaloni bites into a too-mustardy sandwich. Well, he asked for the extra-hot English mustard, and it seems he can’t take it. Notably, perhaps, Chaplin denies Jack Oakie his own close-up, but the two men writhing on the divan as their throats combust is quite amusing.

Mustard was, of course, fully weaponized in the First World War, with far from hilarious consequences.

“Aiuta!” screams Il Duce. Either Chaplin couldn’t be bothered coming up with cod-Italian and resorted to the real thing, or Oakie is improvising.

This is all to get the characters into a furious political discussion in which neither can actually speak — they just mouth at each other in scorching muteness in between stuffing their gobs with hankies.

Recovering a bit, Heinkel attempts to demonstrate on a fistful of spaghetti how he will tear the Bacterians apart. Unfortunately for him, the many strands of pasta exhibit the same unbreakable qualities of the stacks of sticks or fasces used by the ancient Romans to signify group strength — E pluribus unum –– and which give the Fascist movement its name. Heinkel is left huffing as he stretches the spaghetti like a minute Charles Atlas demonstrating dynamic tension.

At an opportune moment he releases one end and twangs Napaloni in the kisser. So it’s war! Chaplin wields a sausage like a short sword, while Oakie grabs a pie. As Chekov says, you can’t introduce a custard pie in act two without going splurch in the kisser almost immediately, so a hack from the international press is introduced, peeping into the buffet room, his snooping features plastered in pie at once.

By the time Henry Daniell reenters, Heinkel and Napaloni are threatening one another with huge platters of mashed potato and something unidentifiable. Mutually assured destruction. Herring defuses the crisis and the stage is set for Tomainia’s invasion of Osterlich.

Very nice closing gag where Napaloni hands his mash to the Bacterian ambassador (Carter DeHaven? Really?), a much (even) smaller man, who totters under the unexpected weight of the potatoes, before crashing to the floor, offscreen. We don’t get to enjoy the sight of him buried in spud, but again Chaplin is enjoying the use of the audience’s imagination, which has the added advantage that he doesn’t have to cut away from HIMSELF.

TO BE CONCLUDED